A Letter to a Friend
Suiting up for Life
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 2, 2018
You are nearly a generation younger than I am, but as you
say we are kindred spirits. That is
because we are both persons, individuals, dedicated to belief systems, which although
similar are not identical, but belief systems nonetheless that are personal and soulful.
We were both athletes but played sports as recreational
outlets while focusing on developing our cognitive skills and sensitive souls
to what we considered a more pressing concern, the effective utilization of
our inherent ability in the service of others, not necessarily for wealth and
recognition but to make a difference while on this magnificent planet.
You in the publishing business and me embedded in the
complex corporate organization have seen the drift away from people as persons
to robotic electronic detachment in all avenues of enterprise, endeavor and social
engagement.
Being a writer, you say, is not for sissies, and I agree. But what explains the boring repetitiveness of journalistic and literary discourse today? I've come to being a writer late in life, and whereas you have won many writing accolades I've been nominated for only one (nonfiction Pulitzer).
I agree that your success has come from courage, not commas. Saturday Evening Post's literary critic Granville Hicks once claimed that novelist John Updike wrote like an angel but had nothing to say.
Updike, darling of The New Yorker magazine, judiciously dotted his i's and crossed his t's, and always knew when and where to use a comma or the proper adverb to the satisfaction of that publication's editors.
Life is not perfect, so why should our sentences be confined necessarily to the limits of arbitrary mechanical and grammatical structuring?
Alas, politics and mass communication reflect the
absurdity of dehumanizing information, data and selective facts. Once this brew comes out of the grinder, it invariably supports the gullibility of one audience as opposed to that of another. Consequently, words and ideas assume the convention and consistency of vanilla producing stalemate
and stagnation at the expense of comprehension and action.
The irony is that “fact
checkers” check the facts that support the checkers’ biases while
claiming to be objective. Objectivity has paradoxically become impersonal when personal validity is subjective. Analytics have invaded philosophy and theology, sports and life styles leading to societal fragmentation rather than integration. Consequently, the focus is on the part at the expense of the whole.
If anything, an obsession with progress has led to fractured personal identity and a bland sameness as individualism has morphed into collective dependence and passive acceptance as evolutionary development has stalled.
Sixty years ago, longshoreman turned philosopher Eric Hoffer
reminded us of the power of the herd mentality with its hysterical rush to become "true
believers." This was not a new discovery for it has existed as long as man has allowed others to do his thinking for him discouraging him from knowing himself or stepping out of the box of conventional authority.
Earlier, when not yet a boy of nine, America found itself stumbling into a European war when national policies aggravated the Empire
of Japan to bomb the US Seventh Fleet based at Pearl Harbor.
Desperation
drives societies as it does individuals to the extremes of irrational
behavior.
Japan, in a fit of anxiety feeling increasingly cut off from essential oil and steel resources by American foreign policy, was persuaded by Japanese War Lords to attack the US Seventh Fleet based on the island of Honolulu on December 7, 1941, which awakened the sleeping American industrial giant.
For this act, the United States Air Force would subsequently drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This created a level of destruction that astounded even those who had worked on the Manhattan Project.
President Harry S. Truman justified his decision to embrace this precipitous action on the rationale that it would save American lives from an invasion of Japan, and would end the war in the Pacific, which it did accomplish.
Through the cunning and persuasive mime of British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, the United States entered the war in Europe in 1942, saving Europe, while forever sacrificing its own parochial and pastoral isolation.
At the war's end, the US would assume a global presence which it has never relinquished. Quite remarkably, it would send young people (such as myself) from all levels of the food chain who had managed to acquire college degrees and the skills required to bring order and relief, commerce and technology to peoples about the globe. These neophytes (like myself), however, entered the world stage essentially ignorant of that world.
Academic Nancy Isenberg recently wrote a
book that offended the American psyche with its provocative title: White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of
Class in America. This provocative expose places the focus on the underbelly of American society that is not readily acknowledged.
Predictably, the book has vanished from the bookshelves of many libraries and
book stores as it is not how Americans like to see themselves: crude, rude and
tattooed.
As a boy growing up in a quiet community on the banks of the Mississippi
River in the Midwest, I stayed close to my Irish American community where my neighbors
were basically Irish Roman Catholics, as was my grocer, doctor, dentist, priests, nuns and parishioners, railroad and factory workers, mothers and fathers,
and housewives, while 80 percent of the rest of the community were mainly
Protestant with continental European roots.
Because I was tall for my age, athletic and of sturdy
construction whereas most of my classmates and teammates were less so, I was recruited
from the sixth grade on to attend the public high school of the city.
It was my first introduction to an alien world, a world that
knew little about Catholics much less Irish Catholics, or the nature of our deeply embedded culture. The
Sisters of St. Francis had been my teachers during an era when such nuns were
totally dedicated to teaching and seemingly unaware of any personal
motivation.
These nuns, however, had a bias towards some
students and I thrived on that bias as it favored me without apology. That was not so in the public high school,
either in the classroom or on the athletic field. Students and athletes had been groomed from
junior high and were expected to carry the gauntlet to the next level.
But little St. Patrick’s grammar school with only
fourteen boys in my class, four of whom were recruited by the high school coaches, pushed these junior high expectant athletes to the bench, as these interlopers made the starting five in
basketball and the starting eleven in football to the chagrin of many parents
and school administrators.
Years later, when I got to know African Americans
as students and athletes at university, I came to appreciate the validity of their constant complaint: “We don’t have to be as good as whites; we have to be twice as good in
order to be given equal consideration.” It seemed to also apply to the Irish.
African American were
invisible when I was a youth. You didn’t see them downtown,
in the movie theaters, at the municipal swimming pool, or at the baseball stadium. They weren’t on the junior league baseball
summer teams much less high school athletic teams. They were everywhere and nowhere. This is prominent in my book IN THE SHADOW OF
THE COURTHOUSE, which deals with growing up during WWII from the age of eight to thirteen.
My four years of high school were a little like the
twenty years of Henry Adams. He failed to write a word about them in The Education of Henry Adams, passing over the period from 1871 (at age
33) to 1892 (at age 54), seeing it a maturation period of no other consequence.
The only significant decision I made during my
four years in high school was to realize in my sophomore year that I was putting far too much effort into athletics and not enough time into academics. Athletics were fun but they were not preparing me for life.
From my freshman year on, I was taking the more difficult academic
courses, but was not focused on them until my sophomore year. Significantly, the valedictorian of
my class, a person I looked up to, asked me to be his roommate at the
University of Iowa. I still feel the goose
bumps when I reflect on that experience as his offer legitimized me to myself as a budding
scholar. That freshman year was a great
experience and if I were younger I think I might write a book about it as we consistently set the curve in our academic pursuits.
World War Two was now history and parochial America
was feeling its oats while demonstrating its ignorance of world history and other
cultures about the globe. Falsely, we Americans assumed that the recovering world wanted to be remade in the image and likeness of the United States. Suddenly, Americans became narcissistic and self-indulgent buying into
the hype that they were the “greatest generation.”
There were reasons for being proud given that in 1941 the nation
was totally unprepared for war. Forgotten as well was the fact that the
United States was protected by two vast oceans from the conflagrations of Europe and the Pacific. This allowed the nation to hit on all cylinders in mass war production. David Halberstam writes knowingly about this
in The Next Century.
Halberstam marvels at the collective
resolve of a people that successfully put aside their differences to reach
a level of synergy not witnessed before in history. Pomp and circumstance, social stratification
and protocol, feudalistic allegiances and monarchical intransigence were not a problem for Americans as they were for Europeans. Let us not forget Europe lacked the luxury of war production without the threat of constant military attack.
Without such cultural limitations, assembly lines operated 24/7 across the United States producing ships,
planes, tanks, arms and logistical materials that rivaled the Allies and Axis
powers combined.
Heady with that achievement, the peace that followed the war was, however, short lived as there was the Korean War, and then the Vietnam War, followed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, while
tiny North Korea remains a present bellicose menace as it continues to launch intercontinental ballistic
missiles over the Sea of Japan, boasting that it can reached the United States with its missiles.
Two things happened while I was in college. The postwar economic boom took off and
conspicuous consumption became therapy for an anxious age. The other was the natural paranoia
that seems endemic to the American culture came to be exploited by Wisconsin Republican
Senator Joseph McCarthy and his aids Roy Cohn and G. David Shine.
That shadowy mist hung over my college campus life, first with the execution in June 1953 of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg for giving atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union followed by the histrionics that came to be called "McCarthyism."
Returning from class to my college dormitory, I would go to the lounge and sit in front of the tiny black and white television set and watch the
United States Army hearings featuring the sad face and caustic wit of Joseph Welch, the Army’s chief counsel, as he exchanged barbs with Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The senator had accused the US State Department of harboring communist Soviet spies, claiming 205 communists had
infiltrated the US State Department. It
was the era of the Cold War and the senator was riding that hysteria to
advantage, that is, until he accused a
member of Joseph Welch’s staff of being a communist.
Sitting in front of
the small television set, a witness to history, I heard the senator make that accusation with lawyer Welch responding by uttering the immortal lines that
would ultimately end Senator McCarthy’s career. The senator would die a short time later at the age of
48.
Joseph Welch said slowly in a nasal voice, “Until this
moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your
recklessness.” When McCarthy attempted
to counter punch and regain the advantage, Welch, now clearly angry,
interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
The “Red Scare” would not abate once McCarthy, Cohn and Shine were off stage as the House UN American Activities Committee (HUAAC) would
continue the mad frenzy holding seemingly endless hearings parading professional writers, directors,
actors, and studio czars of Hollywood before the committee while covertly subjugating them to being black balled from working in that industry. It was The Age of the United States of Anxiety, an emotional status that has yet to be relinquished.
NEXT
A LETTER TO A FRIEND – Finding
Life Was Ready for Me but I Wasn’t Ready for Life!
